A lot of what we focus on here at Church Marketing Online is reaching out to share the Gospel and bring people into your church. But it is also important to reach out to those who are already in your church.

I’ve seen many a church who did some great work in outreach and were bringing in lots of new people, but the church never seemed to grow. The reason was that they were doing such a poor job with their existing members that people were leaving as fast as new people were coming. Not good.

There are many elements to keeping people as members of a church. Read More

A couple weeks ago I wrote about faking social media. Generally speaking, it’s best to avoid faking social media and, instead, work on creating real connections with people. This is especially important for the church. But just because you shouldn’t totally fake your church’s social media presence, doesn’t mean there aren’t some tools you can use to make things easier and more efficient.

Here are 5 tools which can make you more effective at social media and save you time: Read More

I was reading an article over at MickMel.com entitled, “You Can’t Fake It On Social Media“. The thrust of the article is that for social media to work for an organization, you must actively engage with people through social media. You can’t fake it. But is that really true? Can you fake it? Read More

I was reading a post from Steve Sjogren’s blog, Confessions of a Stumbling Servant, and he had a great post about the importance of using different outreach approaches in your ministry because different people are attracted by different things.

“If we hope to attract lots of fish — and that is the name of the game if we are professional fisher people — we must try for a number of kinds of fish. To have just one pole in the water isn’t going to cut it.” Read More

Kevin Hendricks over at Church Marketing Sucks has a great article about the recent flash mob video from Second Baptist Church, “Dance Your Shoes Off”. He makes some great points what a viral video like this which involved so many people can do, including:

“Such a public event does have the benefit of multiple perspectives. It’s not limited to the official video. Loads of people watching the event can be seen snapping pictures and taking cell phone video. These alternate perspectives show up online, spreading the core idea even further.”

The Catalyst Conference in Dallas took place May 11-13. I was reading a couple of blogs of people who were attending the conference and live blogging the event. It struck me. Every one of these bloggers is providing free marketing for the event.

Earlier this week Bing announced that they were rolling out some great new features which integrate Facebook into their search results. These features influence search results, show you your Facebook friends “liked” pages, provide for Facebook interactions with your friends while searching. You can read more about the features here, “Bing and Facebook Launch New Integration Revolutionizing Search“.

While there are a lot of cool features Bing has announced, there are something that can really benefit churches greatly. Here’s how… Read More

The other day, I posted about a video of Kelsey and the miraculous story of her birth. You can view the video here. This is an amazing story, but also a great example of how taking a few minutes to setup sharing buttons on content can make a huge difference in how much your content is shared. Read More

Social media is a revolution. At no other time in history has a message or news about an event or even video of that event been able to be spread to so many people so quickly. Consider the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Social media is huge these days. Facebook has about 600 million members (that’s nearly twice the entire US population), Twitter has somewhere around 150 million users, and some are even suggesting that search engines will eventually be replaced by social networking (we’ll see). So, do you think the church needs to be involved in social media? Read More

Church SEO

When people search for churches in your city does your church website appear at the top of Google, Yahoo, and Bing? No? Studies show that most people use search engines to find what they are looking for, including churches. If you aren't on the first page, you are missing out on visitors. Learn more about Church SEO at CMO University

About Church Marketing Online

Church Marketing Online is dedicated helping churches reach the people in their communities through the Internet. We do this by explaining search engine marketing for churches, discussing social media and how it can be used by churches, and facilitating conversations about other online church marketing ideas. The CMO blog is here to educate, discuss Internet evangelism and outreach, and offer church growth resources.